Background
Akira Kanayama was born in 1924 in Osaka, Japan.
1957
The artist painting in his studio with a remote-controlled toy car
1957
Kanayama hanging his painting done with a remote control mechanical car on vinyl
Group photo: Yamazaki, Shiraga, Shimamoto, Murakami, Kanayama, Motonaga, Tanaka, and Ukita.
Footprint rugs by Akira Kanayama
Akira Kanayama was born in 1924 in Osaka, Japan.
Akira left Tama Art and Design School, which is presently called Tama Art University, in 1947. Then he studied at the Osaka Municipal Institute of Art until 1959.
Akira Kanayama started his artistic career painting with an automatic toy car. By mediating this process through a mechanical device, he removed personal or psychological expression from his work. Akira Kanayama’s painting machine from 1957 was a four-wheeled device that Kanayama could remote-control to create paintings approximately 180 by 280 cm. The canvas lay on the floor and the machine dripped and poured paint on the picture pane. Kanayama’s remote-controlled painting machine mimics Jackson Pollock’s drips painting – a technique he developed in the 1940’s.
Kanayama began making his Machine Drawings in 1957, which were a critique of automatism and the value it placed on self-expression through gestural painting. Kanayama’s Machine Drawings were made by attaching a can of quick-drying paint to an automatic toy car that created paintings whether or not the artist was even in the room… Kanayama used that technology as a mark-making instrument. By using a vocabulary of form that had technological rather than psychological origins, Kanayama launched a conceptual attack on the Informal and Abstract Expressionist idea that art could or should be an expression of the soul, poured out and worked on a canvas.
Kanayama was the members of the Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Gutai Art Association), an avant-garde art group founded in 1954 in Osaka with the mission to create “an art which has never existed before.” As a member of the group, he became famous for seminal pieces with which he remains associated today: Kanayama’s four-wheel remote control device which enabled him to create automatic Remote-Control Paintings in 1957. The artist married and left the group in the mid-1960s, and continued more intermittently his artistic careers through the beginning of the 2000s.
The Gutai artist Akira Kanayama is less known compared to his partner Atsuko Tanaka, the artist known for her “Electric Dress", created in 1956, although the original use of technology and interest in materials that had not been traditionally used in art were shared among them. Kanayama helped Tanaka in realizing her ideas that involved technology such as her piece “Work (Bell)” in 1955. Kanayama tested a variety of crayons, markers, black and color ink with which the car scribbled or dripped while moving on large pieces of paper and later on white vinyl sheets, which he found the most appropriate for his purpose.
While the artist operated the car on a sheet laid on the floor, its trajectory and the resulting traces of ink were never under the perfect control of the artist. Instead of directly employing one’s own body, as in case of other Gutai artists such as Kazuo Shiraga and Saburo Murakami, Kanayama used a mechanical medium and chance operation to drawn lines. His use of plastic inflatables and footsteps on vinyl sheets in other works also suggest his positive interest in new materials and mediated representation of body. However, when Gutai was “discovered” by the French critic and art dealer Michel Tapié and internationally introduced, these features of Kanayama’s works were disregarded. It is said that his “Work” series was interpreted as alike of Jackson Pollock’s “all-over” style in the art world outside Japan, neglecting the interesting questions that arose about originality and the role of technology in art. The artist died in 2006.
Akira Kanayama adhered to the artistic traditions of Art Informel. He viewed all forms of artistic expression as interrelated. For him, paintings could be created through performance, and performances could be a form of painting.
Akira Kanayama helped form the Zero Society (Zero-kai) in 1952. He also became a member of Gutai in 1955 but withdrew in 1965.
Akira Kanayama married Atsuko Tanaka, a Japanese famous artist, in the mid-1960s.
